Benedict Vitai

“My wife always says she’d love to live in the countryside. I like the idea of escaping all the nonsense of London, but you know what? My heart and soul are here in the city, really. So I think that’s where I’ll always be.”
― Craig Taylor, Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It

“People in this land,’ he wrote in 1941, ‘seem not even yet to realise that in the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. I have in this War a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler for ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”
― Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

“Plain blunt people may be a little afraid of formal music. But I have lived to regret that failure. Every man [or woman], barbarian or civilised, should play at least one musical instrument. And have a trade: cobbling or carpentry or whatever.”
― Benedict Kiely, Drink to the Bird

“Conscience is always enlightened when sin is seen as hurting someone we love. No sin can touch one of God’s stars or silence one of His words, but it can cruelly wound His heart. Once the Penitent understands this truth, he can see why he has such emptiness and desolation and his soul: he hurt the one he loves.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, The Priest Is Not His Own